SOURCE: “Keeping the Family Firm,” in New Statesman, October 13, 1995, pp. 30-1.

In the following review, Giddens offers positive assessment of Trust.

The End of History and the Last Man was always going to be a hard act to follow. Much criticised in the social-science community, Francis Fukuyama's book was actually a major work that captured the mood of 1989 and after. It deservedly projected the author to global fame, and one might suspect a few sour grapes in the dismissive attitudes of some academic critics. His new book isn't going to set the cash registers ringing as his first did and it has nothing like the same originality. Yet it is a work of considerable intellectual substance, engagingly written and ambitious in content.

We're back on the familiar terrain of the end of history. Right up to 1989, there were deep cleavages between different ideologies; but these have been replaced...